St. Philip's began as a church school

Updated 4:15 pm, Friday, February 21, 2014

If you've ever wondered how St. Philip's College, the oldest institution within the public Alamo Colleges system, came by its religious-sounding name, it's because it started as a church school — and a unique one at that.

A historically black college, St. Philip's was shepherded into being by a former Confederate soldier during the depths of the post-Reconstruction era that also gave rise to the Jim Crow laws that ushered in a cruel system of segregation.

The ex-Confederate was Virginia-born James Steptoe Johnston, first bishop of the independent Episcopal Diocese of West Texas, and the school he founded in 1895 first was known as St. Philip's School for Colored Children. It was named for its sponsoring parish, established the same year as the city's first African-American Episcopal congregation, also approved by Johnston after a large delegation from among the members of the leading African Methodist Episcopal church “asked to be taken under his episcopal care,” according to one of his biographers, A.W.S. Garden, in “The Story of West Texas.”

Although Johnston's young diocese had “no funds in hand for such an undertaking ... feeling that 'God was in it' and 'walking by faith, not by sight,' he consented and took up the burden.” Canvassing northern friends turned up enough money to buy a former German Methodist church, now known as the Little Church of La Villita, and St. Philip's Episcopal Church moved into 502 Villita St.

The school began as a weekend sewing class for six African-American girls and evolved into St. Philip's Normal and Industrial School. Johnston and church members raised money to build a separate, two-room brick building for the schoolhouse. St. Philip's was free to grow from a single class to a grammar and vocational school that eventually served grades one through eight, adding teachers, subjects and extracurricular clubs, such as a chorus, the J.S. Johnston Literary Society and a needlework guild.

Under the leadership of Artemisia Bowden, from 1902 to 1954, the school was informally known as Bowden's School and grew from its original modest mission into a junior college for the city's black community, moving in 1917 to its present location — originally 2120 Dakota St., now 1801 Martin Luther King Drive — on the historically black East Side.

St. Philip's offered not only vocational but traditional academic courses to prepare students to go on to earn degrees from four-year institutions. It also was a locus for intellectual and cultural presentations by visiting African-American scholars and artists, as well as class plays and “song fests” that were open to the public.

The Episcopal diocese withdrew its support of St. Philip's Junior College in 1931, a few years after divesting itself of two other schools, Saint Mary's Hall and West Texas Military Academy. Bowden fought to keep her school open through the Depression era, raising funds through tours with student singers and occasionally dipping into her own scant resources to meet expenses. She kept it afloat as a private institution until 1942, when St. Philip's joined San Antonio College under the auspices of the San Antonio Independent School District; a few years later, it became part of a new entity with its own elected board, the Alamo Community College District.

As the civil rights movement began to effect changes throughout the South, the two original colleges in the system began admitting students regardless of race in 1955, with St. Philip's welcoming its first white students and San Antonio College its first African-American students.

Since then, St. Philip's has grown far beyond Johnston's and even Bowden's dreams for it, with expansions from the 1990s onward adding a state-of-the-art theater complex, a Center for Health Professionals and a Center for Learning Resources. The school is the only college federally designated both as a historically black and Hispanic-serving institution and currently awards more than 1,400 associate's liberal arts and technical degrees each year.

Email Paula Allen at historycolumn@yahoo.com. Follow her at twitter.com/sahistory column.